


all the way home I'll be warm

by thelostcolony



Series: Rowana's Twelve Days of TURN Christmas [1]
Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: For Rowana, Gen, love you lots ! Merry Christmas !
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 12:33:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17022702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelostcolony/pseuds/thelostcolony
Summary: She's always loved the stars.Sitting across from him, stars in his eyes, she knows she's falling for him, too.





	all the way home I'll be warm

**Author's Note:**

> This is for my dear friend Roro, who has stuck with me through thick and thin! This is just a little Christmas present to her to express my love and appreciation for her and everything she's done for me ! Here's to many years of friendship and many more to come ! <3

_ “Well the fire is slowly dying, _

_ and my dear, _

_ we’re still goodbying… _

_ but as long as you love me so...” _

_ -Let It Snow, Dean Martin _

 

Since she was a child, she’d loved the stars.

Their glow had been irresistible to her. No one could tell her why they shone, or why they changed sometimes, or why there were shapes in the sky. She always used to reach for them, make her hand into a fist, and bring it down to whisper to her cupped palm. She always thought she’d captured a star, and had then wished upon it. She’d always fallen in love with things out of her reach.

She falls in love with him.

It’s hard not to, she reasons with herself. He’s charmingly naïve, all awkward glances and shy smiles when they first meet.  _ You’ve never done this before, _ she claims, and she knows it’s true from the flush to his cheeks and the purse to his lips. She finds him endearing in a way she’s never found anyone.

And then, instead of deciding to stumble through a coupling anyway, he asks her for a game of chess.  And when she beats him not once, not twice, but three times, he looks more enamored with her than he had while she was on his lap.

So of course, of course… she falls in love with him.

André knows. She thinks that there’s very little that André doesn’t know---and in any case, for all Ben may be a spymaster he has an awful poker face. She thinks that André, as skilled in deduction as he is, can read Ben like an open book. 

And as the weeks blur as they pass and she and Ben talk and play chess and laugh together, and André keeps paying her and paying her without fail… looking back, she thinks maybe André knew sooner than she had.

She thinks maybe André read her, too. Found the love there.

She’s sitting beside the fire, across from Benjamin and his lined face (Major Tallmadge has long since become Benjamin has long since become  _ Ben _ , but she likes his name and the way it sounds on her lips). The chess set is between them, his eyes focused on the pieces in a way that tells her he’s trying to focus himself fully in the moment. That usually means a bad day---a bad night. If the dark purple circles around his eyes couldn’t have told her of his restlessness, then the single minded focus on the board does; he’s fighting one of the demons in his head.

She’s seen glimpses of the wounds, of course. It would have been hard not to, considering he can barely move even after weeks of recovery. He’s swaddled in bandages like a child, face dappled in half healed scrapes.  When he moves, he does so deliberately.

She knows, deep down, that he was tortured. She’s never asked him, and he’s never provided the information, and André, for his part, hasn’t confided anything beyond Ben’s name. There’s something about asking, about requesting him to share the deepest part of himself, that seems taboo---like maybe they live in a world where the war doesn’t matter. In this little room, on opposite sides of a chess set, they exist only to each other, and all thoughts of the outside world seem small and insignificant.

Looking at him now, aglow in the firelight, Mary thinks she can understand how she fell in love without realizing. She thinks she can understand how, even now, she’s falling in love and not even knowing it. Every time she says goodbye to him, she feels a pang in her chest, an emptiness that only grows with every step she takes away. It’s why she’s still visiting---why she would still visit even if André decided to retract his payment.

Benjamin shines radiantly in the amber lighting, like a star. 

And Mary has always had a dear love for things out of her reach.


End file.
